A cyber
war is being waged and as interested parties pick their sides,
countries like like
the Netherlands take steps to silence piracy, while India
takes steps to shelter their citizens. Yet despite the ongoing
conflicts and controversies, experts say that in the very near
future, P2P traffic is expected to rise dramatically.

According
to the Cisco Visual Networking Index, P2P traffic is predicted to
grow to more than 7
petabytes per month by 2014. Despite this rise in traffic,
as a percentage share of the entire internet, it will drop over the
next few years. Five years ago, studies indicated that P2P
traffic dominated up to three quarters of all of the bandwidth on the
internet. At the end of last year, these numbers were down to
39 percent. The index indicates that the number will go down to
17 percent by 2014.

While BitTorrent, the leading file-sharing
protocol, is expected to continue to dominate the majority of
bandwidth consumption, the rest of the traffic growth will come from
streaming sites like YouTube. Cisco predicts that P2P traffic
will see it's lowest numbers at this year's end and video traffic
will rise -- P2P traffic will not be the leading internet
traffic type for the first time since 2000.

In addition
to BitTorrent, eDonkey, Gnutella and other P2P traffic, file-hosting
services like as Rapidshare and MegaUpload are expected to see a rise
in popularity. Cisco indicates that these types of sites will
see an increase in traffic by nearly eightfold -- to 4
Petabytes per month in 2014.

Roughly 46 percent of all
traffic in 2014 will be attributed to internet video.

Almost
half of all file-sharing traffic occurs in the Asia-Pacific region
and Cisco anticipates that these numbers will relatively remain the
same.